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An hour or so ago Sun Microsystems made good on an earlier pledge to issue further "non-assertion covenants" (NACs) in support of open standards. That's a good thing, and more vendors should do the same thing.
Why? Because this type of IPR tool has multiple advantages over traditional "RAND" licensing, and facilitates easy implementation of new standards. It's also much more friendly to open source implementations, and makes it impossible for a patent owner to have "second thoughts" (like Adobe did with its ISO-adopted PDF format last week), because it's a blanket permission given to everyone in advance. The new NACs relate to the OASIS Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) V2.0 standard and two "single sign-on" specifications co-developed with Microsoft. Ideally, this type of commitment will become much more common in the standards arena, leading to the same sort of "patent commons" that IBM, Sun, Nokia and others have been building to support open source software.
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